Thy name is

"______, thy name is ______" is a snowclone used to indicate the completeness with which something or somebody (indicated by the second part) embodies a particular quality (indicated by the first part), usually a negative one.

History

In most instances, the usage is an allusion to the Shakespearean play Hamlet (I, ii, 146). In this work, the title character is chastised by his uncle (and new stepfather), Claudius, for grieving his father so much, calling it unmanly. In his resultant soliloquy, Hamlet denounces his mother's swift remarriage with the statement, "Frailty, thy name is woman." He thus describes all of womankind as frail and weak in character. The phrase is recognized as one of the "memorable expressions" from the play to become "proverbial".

In the book Idiom Structure in English by Adam Makkai, the author asserts that the phrase is included among English idioms that are expressed in a "standard format" and whose usage "signals to the hearer that he is using an authority in underscoring his own opinion." Researchers Andrew Littlejohn and Sandhya Rao Mehta, acknowledged that the famous quote rendered not only a discursive use, but a constructional one as well, noting that "the structure itself can be used a salient, but neutral equation formula...'noun thy name is noun.'"

Examples

Law

• Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from the Court's decision in King v. Burwell, upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, repeatedly used the construction to criticize the Court's majority opinion, stating: "Understatement, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!"; "Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!"; and "Contrivance, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!"

Quoted

• Amos Bronson Alcott famously said of William Ellery Channing in 1871, "Whim, thy name is Channing." He was referring to Channing's Transcendentalist poetry style.

Literature

• The poet Anne Sexton has a poem called "Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman".
• Borrowing directly from Hamlet, Edmond Dantès (disguised as Abbé Busoni) utters the phrase "Frailty, thy name is woman!" in The Count of Monte Cristo after learning that his fiancee, Mercédès, has married his rival Fernand.
• In the James Joyce novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom utters the phrase, "Fraility, thy name is marriage," in response to a quip.

Music

• The Half Man Half Biscuit song "Whiteness, Thy Name Is Meltonian," from the album This Leaden Pall, refers to a brand of None-More-White shoe polish.
• The lyrics "Frailty, thy name is weakness. Vengeance, thy name is pain" appear in the Dark Tranquillity song "...Of Melancholy Burning".
• The song title "Hallowed Be Thy Name" by Iron Maiden

Television

• In The Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Busted", Bart Simpson says "Comedy, thy name is Krusty."
• Ray Romano as Ray Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond says "Devil, thy name is woman!", referring to his wife.
• William Petersen as Gil Grissom on CSI:Crime Scene Investigation says "Vanity, thy name is Hodges", referring to another CSI David Hodges after walking in on him trying to color some of his greying hair with a sharpie while looking intensely at his reflection in a piece of lab equipment.
• In the Season 3 episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy entitled When You Wish Upon An Ed, Jimmy says "Victory, thy name is Jimmy" referring to himself as he enters a race with the other Cul-de-sac kids.
• In Scrubs, Dr. Cox says to Elliot Reid, "Hypocrisy thy name is you," because she is giving patients advice which she cannot follow herself.
• In Bewitched episode 8 of season 1 Samantha says to Darrin "Vanity, thy name is human".
• In Pokémon episode 75 of season 2, Ash says to Pikachu, "Pokémon, thy name is Pikachu."

External links

• "Frailty, thy name is woman", from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy